I don't draw. I have tried, but I just can't seem to pick it up.

But I write.

For years, I've loved the idea behind Inktober. This year, I decided to take it on as an artistic project of my own.

For Inktober, I plan on writing a story. Each day, I'm writing a single sentence of that story starting with the word that's been provided as a prompt.

I'm now two weeks in and I thought I'd share.

I'm not exactly sure where this is going but it works with the Hallowe'en/horror feels that this month provides.

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Inktober 2017
JakeParker Inktober #Inktober #Inktober2017


Hemomancer
Inktober, 2017 by Sylvan Scott

100117

Swift as night on raven’s wings, the hemomancer approached Lakeview: silent as a wound, soft as cobwebs, threatening as a storm, and implacable as death.

100217

Divided by their loss, Arick, Sanderson, Byrne, and Milla left their high school stadium not knowing it would be the last time they would see each other’s faces.

100317

Poison ran between and through them: augmented by wagers made and secret loves exposed; their teams’ failures echoed their own - opening fissures unanticipated.

100417

Underwater within and gasping for breath, their mutual kinship and respect floundered: weakened and disoriented sufficiently for the hemomancer’s power to invade.

100517

Long shadows stretched out to swallow Milla as she turned from Byrne at the cemetery's edge, vowing to walk home between the graves rather than arm-in-arm with a cheater.

100617

Sword-sharp, the umbral patches of darkness swirled about her, muffling her screams, as they sliced her—reduced her—to naught but a bloody echo of her former self.

100717

Shy despite his outward bravado, Byrne kept walking towards home, guilt making him feel tight and small, ever smaller, until the cracks in the sidewalk loomed like canyons to swallow him up.

100817

Crooked thoughts echoed the crooked path Sanderson took, away from his lover—away from Arick—guiding him to become lost in labyrinthine corridors, mirror-smooth and haunted with the sneers and laughs of all those he had embraced yet never informed that the ring on his finger was a promise.

100917

Screech of tires, screech of an owl: both echoed eerily bringing Arick to realize he was alone on the path to his apartment yet, somehow, shadowed by something menacingly close.

101017

Gigantic, the hemomancer’s shrouded form stretched bone-yellow from the leafless bushes to rise-up before Arick, jack-o-lantern and dagger in his knotty hands.

101117

“Run” screamed his soul and run he did ... but only to find himself spiraling out of his body, drawn past blade and a jagged smile, into the candle-lit hollow of the ancient magician’s carved gourd.

101217

Shattered into a thousand fragments, the pumpkin, Arick’s soul, and the rite claiming each of the four former friends ended at the same cacophonous moment.

101317

Teeming carpets of insects—parasites and predators, alike—slithered and scuttled on the ceiling, walls, and floor of the ancient, damp cavern where the sacrificial spirits gathered following their executions.

101417

Fierce, with a tiger’s fury boiling within, the metal-edged fragments of shadow that used to be Milla spun together to become a shrieking column of pain and frustration: slashing at all around her but, mostly, at the cavern roof as if trying to dig herself free from the quartet’s dank, wet grave.